


What Dreams May Come

by hellkitty



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Angst, Community: angst_bingo, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-10
Updated: 2013-08-10
Packaged: 2017-12-23 01:01:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/920130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's canon that Sunstreaker had bad dreams after AHM, and Alpha Trion can only do so much to relieve them.  It's for angst bingo, so, yeah, we sort of stepped into a dark take on the character. If you're a fan of fanon Sunny, give this one a pass. :) I'm just playing with my bingo card.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Dreams May Come

They say that if you die in a dream you wake up.  Sunstreaker knew better. He'd lost count how many times he'd died in dreams--his death, Hunter's death--the flash, the fade, and then the nothingness.  

He knew it too well: how everything burst bright and vivid before your optics, those last instants of life burning themselves with the fury of phosphorus, into your memory, as though welding a seam that sealed your life.  And then how it faded, pixeating, dimming and then sight and sound were lost and it was just you, in a close, heavy darkness, like a cistern.  And then that seemed to fall away, too, and you felt like you were tumbling, endlessly, up and down, pitch and yaw lost to you, until you tore apart, sometimes violent and rending, sometimes simply unraveling, a bit here, a bit there, like a mosaic losing its tiles until there was only the grouted frame, random and empty. 

And then the terrible wait, the absence of self, and a terrible lightness, wondering, worrying if life would reignite or if this one was the final one, the real one, and it was truly, finally over.

He knew death better, more intimately, than anyone he knew, even Ironhide.  Ironhide, who'd stayed behind on Cybertron, as though he couldn't glut enough on death, needed more. 

Sunstreaker had had enough of death, had had enough nights where his processor planted him on the bridge on Cybertron, hands flexing nervously, as though preparing to quickdraw a pistol. And he felt his ventilation, jagged and unsure, the cold air of the dying planet, reeking with the Swarm, filling his olfactory sensors with a kind of corruption.  He could feel the weight keeping him there, his heelplates frozen to the spot, his spark dense as a neutron star as he faced what he'd done.  Abandoned Hunter, and worse, throwing them all to Starscream, a punishment for what they'd dared to do to him.

He'd been proud. All along, even before the war, he'd been cocky, thinking that wits and skill were all that mattered, seeking adventures as though a regular life was simply...boring.  He'd sampled the arenas, testing himself, he always said, but even then he'd known it was vanity and fame and novelty. 

He'd lost that arrogance, had it whittled away bit by bit by the war, and then in ragged chunks by the Machination. He, superior, and he became their thing, their creature and they'd violated him at depths humans couldn't possibly sound.  

He’d lost that pride when he’d begged for death, begged his human captors for that pitiful mercy--turn a button, pull a switch.  You can’t have been ridden by despair for so long and keep any scrap of pride. Even alive again, you can’t erase that, go back to what you once were. He couldn’t go back to who he was, after all that violation, after the look, half of disappointment, half pity, in Sideswipe’s optics as he’d shut the switch that killed Hunter, ended the last feeble thread of Sunstreaker’s life, that blaze that always came at the end of life etching like acid the message that he hadn’t been a hero, that the bridge on Cybertron and his sacrifice hadn’t been enough.

If you could just forge on as if nothing had happened where did the lesson go? Because Alpha Trion was all about lessons, all about the idea that life was learning, and pain was just the more intense lessons. Sunstreaker had wanted to scoff, but he’d wanted to believe that, too, because it made it mean something, made the pain and fear and nightmares and the twinges from his repaired lumbo-motor activators into foundations instead of walls.

So in his dreams he died, night after night, that terrifying dissolution, jolting awake, rebooting hard and ugly, all systems firing alarms, and tried to tell himself it meant something, that it was a pain he deserved, he’d earned, and that he was burning off his past.

They wondered why he recharged alone, why he took no companions. They made jokes about Bob, some vulgar, some innocent, all wrong. All wrong.

Bob.

Bob had been the name of the Machination scientist who had worked on him, treated him as a thing, an object incapable of pain or feelings or thought, and when he’d cornered the youngling Insecticon, he’d taken a brutal kind of pride in its fear and pain as it reeled from the psychic deaths of its hive, in the inversion of power. He’d given it the name as a retribution, a punishment for the unreachable from the impotent.  

But Bob had understood, in a way.  Bob had lost, too, Bob had felt death, known it intimately inside his skull.  Bob had felt death’s darkness reaching for him, pulling him under, and had floundered against it.  A lesson Sunstreaker had learned: you are one with the lowest of them. Alpha Trion had been proud.

He let them keep their jokes, then, because the truth was that the only one he felt could understand that dark, terrified part of him was the misbegotten clone. The truth was that the only one who had looked on him when he was crippled without optics that spoke pity or aversion or disgust had been Bob. That was a loyalty that had come to mean more than all the combat honors in his file. 

Sunstreaker shifted on his berth, wincing at the sciatic flare of pain, a white hot lance up his leg, as he shifted his position, one foot grazing Bob’s sleep-twitching lump.  The insecticon’s ventilation burbled, legs pushing him onto his side, feet twitching, lost in recharge. And Sunstreaker lay, staring at the dark ceiling, peering through the shadows to the lines of the bulkhead and struts, reminding himself he was alive and trying hard not to ask how it made him feel.

**Author's Note:**

> The prompt was 'nightmares' obviously. And I always did kind of wonder why he'd name an Insecticon such a human name. It's safe to say Sunstreaker isn't a fan of humanity.


End file.
